Orrin's All-Time Top Ten (or twelve) List - Political

The modern history of the Republican Party is very much the story of
a battle between East Coast Moderates/Liberals (who essentially accepted
the New Deal, Internationalism, and later the Sexual Revolution) and Southern,
Western, and Midwestern Conservatives (who maintained their opposition
to government aggrandizement of power in the domestic, international and
moral spheres). The Establishment repeatedly managed to foist such
milquetoasty candidates as Wendell Wilkie, Thomas Dewey and Dwight D. Eisenhower
upon the Party--luckily, Ike turned out to be much more conservative than
anyone anticipated. Then in 1964, when the Right Wing finally managed
to get their standard bearer nominated, Barry Goldwater had the bad fortune
to run in the wake of JFK's martyrdom. When Goldwater went down in
flames and took much of the Party with him, the Easterners seized on this
episode as evidence that the Party had to repudiate conservatism and hew
more closely to the politics of the Democratic Party. The fair haired
boy of this movement was John V. Lindsay and his campaign for mayor of
New York City was widely seen as a stepping stone on a path that might
lead Republicans back to the White House. It is against this backdrop
that we must view the quixotic 1965 mayoral run of William F. Buckley and,
given this context, it is not too much to say that Buckley's campaign,
though nearly forgotten now, was one of the seminal events in modern political
history.

When it became clear that Lindsay would be the nominee of both the Republican
and Liberal Parties, and furthermore, thanks to incumbent Robert Wagner's
scandal ridden term, that Lindsay would likely win, Buckley began to write
pieces asserting that it was important that someone who actually represented
Republican views enter the race, simply to guarantee that there would be
an honest debate on the issues. When leaders of the recently formed
Conservative Party approached Buckley and asked him to take on the race,
he agreed, on the understanding that he would not campaign full time and
would continue to fulfill his obligations to the several jobs he held.
He made his reasons for running clear in his announcement speech:

The two-party system presupposes an adversary relationship
between the two parties. That there is
no such relationship in New York Mr. Lindsay makes
especially clear when he proposes as running
mates members of the Liberal and Democratic Parties.
Mr. Lindsay's Republican Party is a sort of
personal accessory, unbound to the national party's
candidates, unconcerned with the views of the
Republican leadership in Congress, indifferent to
the historic role of the Republican Party as
standing in opposition to those trends of our time
that are championed by the collectivist elements
of the Democratic Party. Mr. Lindsay, described
by The New York Times as being "as liberal as a
man can be," qualifies for the support of the Liberal
Party and the Republican Party only if one
supposes that there are no substantial differences
between the Republican Party and the Liberal
Party. That there should be is my contention.

It was clearly understood by all concerned that he would basically play
the role of a gadfly in the race. Indeed, any doubts that he reckoned
how little chance he had of being elected were cleared up at his first
press conference, when to the consternation of staff and Party officials
he gave the following answers to questions:

Q: Do you think you have any chance of winning?

WFB: No

Q: How many votes do you expect to get, conservatively
speaking?

WFB: Conservatively speaking, one.

In the campaign that followed, Buckley, freed from the restraints that
bind a politician who thinks he may win, proceeded to run one of the most
ideological, honest and entertaining campaigns that anyone had ever seen.
He quickly became a media phenomenon, although they were almost uniformly
hostile to him and his views, they loved covering him. And when the
cities newspapers went on strike the race came to center around television
and Buckley was able to totally outclass his opponents, Lindsay and Abe
Beam.

Besides his natural facility with the fairly new medium, Buckley's political
platform turned out to be more popular than anyone expected. Indeed,
his proposals were twenty or thirty years ahead of their time, including
Education reform, Welfare reform, beefed up law enforcement, tax cuts,
balanced budgets, an end to school bussing, abolition of rent control,
and so on. as a result, when the first polls came out, not only was
Beame beating Lindsay, Buckley was polling over 20% and doing particularly
well with Blue Collar Democrats. Suddenly everyone, including he,
had to take his candidacy seriously.

From that point on Lindsay and Beame and their cohorts trotted out all
the trusty anti-conservative canards--tarring him as a racist, an anti-Semite,
anti-Protestant and, somehow, even an anti-Catholic. Buckley ended
up spending so much time defending himself that he lost the momentum he
had gained by being a purveyor of brash new ideas. He acknowledges
that his political inexperience was a major handicap as he allowed himself
to drift off message and into a defensive posture.

When the votes were finally counted, Lindsay won, but with just 45%,
Beame tallied 41% and Buckley polled an impressive 13%. In
the process, he had carved up Lindsay to the point where no one seriously
considered him to have a future in Republican politics and indeed Lindsay
eventually left the party for his natural home with the Democrats.
But more importantly, Buckley demonstrated that there was a significant
segment of the democratic Party that was just waiting to be wooed by a
conservative Republican message. These folks--largely middle or working
class, White, ethnic and Catholic--would later form the backbone of Nixon's
"Silent Majority" and would come to be called Reagan Democrats, but it
was the 1965 New York mayoral race that really showed that conservatism
had an inherent appeal to this population. For this, as for so much
else, the Republican Party is indebted to William F. Buckley.

This book, his account of these events, is one of the funniest political
stories ever written. He looks back not in anger but in bewilderment
at the neophyte mistakes he made, at the shoddy media coverage he received,
at the character assassination he was subjected to and at the entire chaotic
process of running for office, especially in New York City. It's
a real shame that the book is out of print (though easy to find used, see
the link above); it is almost frightening how much of the story remains
topical and pertinent today. In particular, and somewhat ironically,
I couldn't help thinking how badly the Democratic Party today needs someone
like Bill Buckley--someone with wit, grace, style, and actual core convictions
who will remind them that they are supposed to represent something more
than conservatism with an Oprahesque tone. As Buckley said in his
announcement, the American system presupposes two adversary parties.
Men like Goldwater and Buckley made sure that the republican Party offered
"a choice, not an echo"; where is the Democrat who will do the same for
his party, who will undertake a similarly quixotic quest, though it prove
his own unmaking? We're waiting.